This weekend I heard of the conversion story of W.H. Auden, one of – if not my favourite poet(s). He was raised in a High Church Anglican parish and apparently held the censer for the priest, enjoying the liturgies and ‘magic’ of the sacraments.
Having walked away from his faith as a young adult, in 1939 Auden moved to the United States after attending Oxford (Christ Church). One day a newsreel played describing the German invasion of Poland and he heard ordinary Germans in the theatre shouting “die Poles!” and cheering at the footage. Auden left the theatre and was deeply troubled by the lack of explanation his humanistic faith in progress left him. This moved him to the point where he could once again believe in his dogmatic childhood Christianity. A lover of Auden’s allegedly joked about how he used to sneak off to services at the Episcopalian Church nearby and come back grinning like he’d gone a-sinning.
Criticized by many as an unauthentic convert because of his continued homosexual lifestyle, some have stood up to defend the poet. Even one critic of Auden’s described his newfound absolute faith and morality as “like the Law in Luther or Niebuhr, merely a crutch with which to beat us into submission, to force home to us the realization that there is none good but God, that no works can either save us or make us worth saving”. In the same manner another commentator noted that Auden’s prayer seemed to be that of Augustine: “Lord make me chaste, but not yet”
In any case, God knows.